Chapter 14: Stress Can Kill You

Stress Can Kill You!

It is not my intention in this narrative to go into my own life, except as far as that life affected Linda’s. Well at this point my life started having a huge effect on Linda.

December, 2005, after Linda lost her job with the clinic, she quickly found a new job with a local company that gave MRIs. She lost her job in mid-November but was working for the new company before Christmas.

Linda and I both were having problems with weight. I was working out almost every day. I was riding my bike to work. I was trying to watch what I ate (but sometimes seeing the desserts Linda was eating, I had to have some too). Somehow, despite all of this, my weight was still going up. I was now in the 290 range.

I went to my doctor and she tested my thyroid, and found that it was not working properly. Since my family has a history of thyroid problems, I asked to see a specialist. The specialist examined my thyroid and found a lump. She ordered an ultrasound and told me not to worry; that there was only a four percent chance that a lump was cancerous.

The ultrasound showed, not a lump, but hundreds of lumps. In fact the left lobe of my thyroid was completely taken over by the lumps. Half the right lobe had been eaten. She scheduled me for a needle biopsy and told me again not to worry, that there was only a four percent chance that a lump was cancerous. I asked if that was a four percent chance per lump, and she said yes.

On Friday, January 6, I had my needle biopsy. Over the weekend Linda and I went to a party held by her new job. I have a picture of the two of us at that party. I keep it because it may be the last picture ever taken of me smiling.

I did not feel well all weekend. On Wednesday I missed work. On Thursday, I missed work again. Something just did not feel right. So I called the advice nurse from my insurance. She asked me to look at the back of my throat. When I looked, I found that I could not open my mouth on one side. I told the nurse what was happening and she told me to get to the ER.

That week, stroke was on everyone’s mind. Ariel Sharon had just had his. I called Linda, who was on her way home from her AA meeting. When she got home, she drove me to the ER.

At the ER they told me that I was not having a stroke, that I had something called Bell’s Palsy and that in a few weeks, I would regain control of my face. I went home. At home, I got a call from my thyroid specialist, an endocrinologist. She was blunt. Yes, I had cancer, and she told me that the surgeon’s office was going to call and set up a consultation.

Tuesday next week I was still sick as a dog. Both sides of my face had stopped working. I had to tape my eyes shut at night, my sense of taste was gone, and I was in terrible pain emanating from my left ear into my jaw.

That day, I visited my surgeon for the first time. He took one look at me and announced that I was too sick to have surgery. My cancer was slow-growing, and I could wait up to six months before I had it removed. I should get the paralysis taken care of first.

That day I visited my normal doctor. She was surprised that the facial paralysis had moved to both sides of my face. Sometimes Bell’s Palsy can become bilateral, but that is so rare that it was much more likely that I had a brain tumor.

Linda took that news very well, and we went for an MRI to check. Fortunately, nothing was found. I did not have a brain tumor.

Next week Linda and I met with my neurologist, and started testing to see what in the world was going on.

As for what was causing the facial problems, they never found out, and to this day I still cannot smile.

Linda was doing great at work and they soon changed her hours from part time to full time, including working two Saturdays a month.

Following the meeting Linda and I had with Megan, Linda had asked me to wait six months before deciding whether I was going to leave her. The six months was now over and it looked like Linda had done it. On one of the Saturdays that Linda was working, I went to the local nursery and bought a new tree. I then took Linda to dinner and we talked about the six months. She had done it, and I now wanted to know if she still wanted to be married to me. She told me she did. When we got home, I showed her the tree and told her I would plant it near our wedding tree to symbolize our new drug-free life and someday hang a hammock on it.

February 17th, 2006, was Linda’s 45th birthday. Linda went to sleep in her favorite room at the Aquilo where I took her for her birthday. She told me how surprised she was to be alive. All her life she had known that she would not live to be 45. Well she had, and I told her now she was a real pistol, a 45.

On Friday the 24th, Linda went out to dinner with some of the girls from work. One of the ladies was retiring and they were giving her a retirement party. Linda had a great time and stayed and talked as most of the girls headed home. Once they were down to three or four left, someone wanted to know if they wanted to go back to her place and party.

Linda did not get home until 6:00 a.m., having spent the night doing cocaine with some of the girls from work. I thought about killing the tree I got her, but it was not the tree’s fault. I thought about leaving her, but I could not bring myself to do that either. Instead, I continued trying to kill myself.

No, I was not suicidal. I was not cutting my wrists, or putting my head in the oven. But my body was breaking down. The facial paralysis was getting better, but I had developed diabetes, and now I was having terrible stomach pains and blood in my stool. The doctors ran all kinds of tests and could not find a cause. They did find eleven polyps in my colon; five were pre-cancerous, but there was no sign of why I was in pain or why that pain just finally went away.

Personally, I have no doubt that stress played a huge part in all the medical problems I was facing. Linda would possibly have to watch her husband dying.

Linda continued to go to AA meetings every day, and made some friends in AA. Now, unfortunately, one has to be careful with friends one makes in AA. Linda made several, and most of them led her astray.

In this case, her friend was a lawyer, but that did not stop her from being a cocaine addict, nor did it stop her from getting Linda to pawn her engagement ring to finance a party, nor did it stop her from blackmailing Linda by holding the receipt for her engagement ring hostage until we paid her for it.

In April of 2006 Linda somehow managed to steal from our household three times.

May of 2006 was another terrible month for Linda. Not only did she have to deal with my problems and impending surgery, but also one of the most important things in Linda’s world got sick.

When Linda moved in with me, she had two cats: Mini and Samantha. Linda loved them both, but Mini was Linda’s special kitty. She loved her the most, and now she was sick. There was something wrong with her liver. Mini was losing weight, throwing up green bile, and lethargic.

Over time, she stopped drinking or eating. We did the best we could for Mini. I force-fed her, and watered her with an eyedropper. We let the vet keep her overnight so they could give her IV fluids, but nothing was helping, and finally Linda decided to have her put down on June 24, 2006.

Linda did not have much time to mourn Mini’s passing, as I was getting worse. Most of my symptoms were getting better, but now the growth in my throat could easily be felt. I do not know what slow-growing is supposed to mean, but this did not seem slow to me.

I got back in touch with the surgeon, and we scheduled to have my thyroid removed on July 19, 2006.

My surgery was almost a setting for public celebrations. My parents, one of my sisters, and one of my nephews flew up for the event. We all went out to dinner the night before, and they all came with me to the hospital. Before I went into surgery, I gave Linda $60 just in case she needed anything or if something went wrong. It was the largest amount I thought I could safely give her.

The surgery did not go fine, but I survived. The doctor told me they found cancer in everything they touched. “Massive and extensive” are the words he used. Now my thyroid gland was completely removed and for the rest of my life, I will have to take synthetic thyroid daily.

When I got home from the hospital, I asked Linda for the money back, and she told me she had given it to her sponsor to hold for her. I asked her to get it back from the sponsor, but she told me that the sponsor had used it and would pay us back later.

I do not know what she was able to do with only $60, but Linda told me later that she had not really given it to the sponsor; she had used it to go out while I was still in the hospital.

Apart from Linda’s husband having his throat cut, in July the company she was working for also announced that they would soon have to start laying some people off or cutting back. They cut Linda back to only working two Saturdays a month. So we started looking for a new job for Linda.

Most of July and August were taken up with my cancer treatment. The cancer had metastasized into every part of my throat, but even under those circumstances, it is still the cancer with the best survival rates. As long as it keeps in the throat, I had a 96% chance of beating it.

The worst part of the treatment is getting ready for it. The treatment itself is to swallow radioactive iodine. It does not hurt. But before you can take it, your body has to be starved for thyroid. For almost a month, you cannot take any thyroid. Without thyroid, your body simply slows down, and if it goes on long enough, you die. After a month without any, I could barely pick up my legs to walk.

Another strange side effect of the treatment is that I was now radioactive. I could not sleep next to my wife for three days. I could not go out to eat for a week, and I could not go into government buildings for six months because I might set off the radiation detectors. I even had to flush the toilet three times after each use, to make certain the radioactivity was washed away.

During all of this, and afterward, Linda kept going to her AA meetings, seeing her therapist, and looking for work.

On September 8th, Linda had a hair appointment at 3:00 p.m. and was going to an AA meeting afterwards. Linda did not come home that night. The next morning she called me. She had woken up in a strange apartment, and she did not know where she was or how she had gotten there.

She finally found her car and managed to find her way home. When she got home, I spoke to her. She had no recollection of anything after going to the hairdresser’s. Her engagement ring was gone, as was her underwear, and one of the shoes she was wearing had the sole ripped off, as if it had gotten stuck and someone had pulled it free. It was obvious to me that it had gotten stuck in her pant leg while someone was undressing her.

Thinking she had been raped, we went to the Emergency Room, but found no help there. They confirmed that she had cocaine and opium in her system, and assumed she was a drug addict. “It is okay to rape drug addicts,” was their attitude. They sent us home.

Later that day we found a note in Linda’s purse with a phone number on it. The note read “ring.” Whoever this was wanted $50 and he would return the ring.

In October, she finally found a job with the local hospital’s pain clinic. In a way, she had come full circle. The psych unit was located in the same building as her new job.

Things were looking up when her addiction picked up its ugly little head again. I had given her the engagement ring so she could wear it while she was at work, and she pawned it again. It was November 6th. This time her drug dealer kept the pawn ticket. The next day, I made arrangements to get her ring out of hock before the drug dealer could.

I told Linda that she would not be seeing that ring until she had been clean for at least three years. Then I made Linda call her sisters and tell them what was going on. Linda balked at this, but I insisted. It was time to bring things out in the open. She needed their support to get through this. Those were two very hard phone calls for Linda, but she made them, and I hoped they would help.

Linda’s sister Sarah offered to pay for a plane ticket for Linda to go back to Wichita Falls and see her new nephew if she stayed clean till New Year’s.

I do not know whether Linda made it or not. Linda was doing great at work, but she made a fatal mistake. The department she worked in had something called the kitty fund. This was a fund that everyone in the department donated to, so they would have some money to send someone a card if they got sick, or some flowers if someone died.

Linda liked the idea of working on this, but I do not think she realized that she would have the money herself. When she took over the fund, they handed her $200 cash. She took the money to her office, and very quickly someone stole it from her desk. So we had to replace it. Then she lost it in the parking lot, and we had to replace it again. Now you can say, no, she used it for drugs, but if she was not at work she was with me, so she did not have time to do the drugs. And yes, her luck was this bad. Or maybe I am just a fool and she was finding ways to get away with it without my knowing.

Christmas that year came and I felt bad now that Linda did not have an engagement ring. I was looking at overstock.com when I saw a ring that was almost like hers. The diamond was cubic zirconium and round, the ring itself was sterling silver, not gold and platinum. But it was close, and it only cost $30.00. If she wanted to pawn it, for $1.50, more power to her.

A few weeks after Christmas, Linda returned to her drug dealer and gave him the new ring in exchange for her drugs. The idiot had seen her hock a ring that looked like that for $400 and thought he was getting a great deal. What a jerk.

I was always looking for a ray of sunshine and I hoped that by doing this Linda would have cut herself off from drug dealers. I would have been scared to go any place I might run into this jerk if I was her.

Things really started to look like they were looking up. Linda was doing great at work. She was making friends outside of AA. Finally, we were slowly climbing out of debt. And I did not know about several of these times when she went out.

At the end of January 2007, I started looking for Linda’s daughter in earnest. We had found a list of all girls born on that date in her county, and I was using the internet to locate them. I sent a letter to each one asking if she was Linda’s. Unfortunately, we did not find her.

In February, Linda went back to Texas and visited her nephew. While she was there, she also told her father how sorry she was for all the things she had done.

February 17, 2007, dawned with Linda safe and warm in her favorite bed at the Aquilo, shocked that she had survived being 45, and looking forward to living.

She still had to go to AA meetings, she still needed to lose weight, but it looked like maybe she might have a chance at a happy life after all.

Next: Chapter 15 - Kitty Litter

Previous: Chapter 13 - What Can I Do

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